The Algerian Jewish Paradigm: Reflections on a Contemporary Fascinosum

• In Event: France and Algiers

Abstract

Essays written in recent years by prominent scholars encapsulate a contemporary fascination with what I refer to in this paper as the Algerian Jewish Paradigm - a historical and cultural mix of privilege and dispossession, belonging and alienation which was put in motion with the beginning of the French colonization of Algeria in 1830, and the legacies of which continue to resonate in contemporary autobiographical literature. Judith Butler’s 2014 preface for Denis Guenoun’s family memoir and Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s open letter in The Boston Review (2021) in response to Benjamin Stora’s official report to the French government on the effects of the colonization of Algeria, have contributed to nourish in American academia and intellectual circles a conversation about Algeria and the Algerian Jewish Paradigm. Both reveal a sustained interest in this paradigm as a “[mysterium] fascinosum”, a “mystery that attracts”, a model of (un)belonging that seems to contain ideological and affective answers to some of the most burning questions of our time.
My paper analyzes the underpinnings of this fascination, and challenges some of the readings through which the Algerian Jewish Paradigm draws its cultural currency; it also points at the emergence of a new paradox: while scholars like Butler, after Jacques Derrida, Denis Guenoun and Helene Cixous, read into the Algerian Jewish Paradigm an assertion of contemporary Diasporicity, others like Azoulay reclaim, at least theoretically, the notion of Jewish indigeneity to North Africa. Converging readings of Algerian Jewish history under and after French colonial regime invoke conflicting, even antagonistic discourses - one rooted in the currency of ancient territorial belonging in our contemporary discourse, the other based on the cultural currency of an aterritorial, diasporic, exilic identity. How can we understand this new Algerian Jewish “aporia”?
At the crossroads between literature, theory and philosophy, my analysis will point at the emergence of a cultural fascinosum, its inner workings and how they reveal the mechanisms through which we interpret, and use, history.

Author

• Tsivia Frank Wygoda, Bar-Ilan University